1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a dialogue system, in particular, to a speech dialogue system and a speech dialogue operation method, which are applicable for recognizing a receiver.
2. Description of Related Art
As the automation service has become the mainstream of modern society, a speech system can be used to provide options and enable a client to complete desired transactions simply by pressing keys for several times, which has been a very common automation service mode. However, it takes a lot of time when the speech system has a large number of prompt options, and what's worse, implicit portions of the communication may be resulted in due to poor receiving conditions. Accordingly, as for the clients, problems of waiting for a long time and high charge fee may occur; and as for the service providers of speech services, they must increase phone numbers or be confronted with the complaints from clients, since some clients occupy the line for an excessive long time, and other clients cannot dial in.
Taking collection of accounts receivables for example, since the contents involve privacy, all providers instruct the personnel to notify a client about the collection by telephone, or transfer an SMS to the client's cell phone or leave a message to the voice mailbox, under the precondition that the SMS or the voice mailbox is assumed to only be checked by the client himself/herself However, the providers cannot confirm whether the client has received the SMS or message or not and how much the client has been aware of this message. Moreover, there are some people who even do not read the SMS or check the voice mailbox in the society. As a result, unlike the telephone notification, when the notification is made through the SMS or voice message, it cannot immediately get to know whether the client has received the entire message to be conveyed completely. Compared with the telephone notification, the notification made through the SMS or voice message is less humanization. Furthermore, the telephone dialogue notification does not have the problem that the client may not know how to use the speech system, instead the telephone dialogue notification can get a response immediately from the client, without waiting for the client to make special replies such as calling back/writing back/sending back another SMS. Even if it fails to make a call to the client, other approaches such as searching by the personnel may also be used at once, so as to try to contact with the client.
One way commonly used in the conventional art is to notify the client by personnels. On one hand, the cost is relatively high, and the personnel cannot provide round-the-clock services due to break time such as off shift, mealtime, holiday and the like. On the other hand, although the notification made through the personnel is more flexible than that made through the dialogue system, relatively emotional reactions also exist and service qualities of different staff cannot consistent with one another. In addition, since messages involving privacy may need to be conveyed, making notifications through personnel may probably infringe personal privacy of the client.
In addition, considering promoting services, for example, when offering marketing messages relevant to low interest loan or circulation interest services to clients, it needs to make a lot of calls to different clients, and only some of them are interested. The way of using personnel to make such inquiries results in high cost and the above personnel problems.
Therefore, the current tendency is that some routine or private message notification is gradually turned to be primarily operated by a machine, and meanwhile, the manpower is focused on clients whose notifications cannot be handled by the machine or difficult to be handled by the machine. Furthermore, if the notification is made through the SMS or voice message, it cannot confirm whether the client has received the entire message to be conveyed or not, and it is relatively difficult to grasp the effects.
The existing dialogue systems are mostly used for inbound parties, and when being used in outbound systems, the dialogue systems are mostly used, for example, to convey messages to or collect opinions from nonspecific subjects in election advertisement or market survey only. Due to the lack of a mechanism for recognizing whether a receiver is the specific person, the existing dialogue systems cannot confirm whether the sample has the repetition problem and cannot be used to deliver messages involving privacy, let alone taking previous dialogues to track and grasp the subsequent operations.
In addition, even if the messages have been correctly conveyed by the personnel, the purpose may not be achieved as expected (for example, a client still has not paid the arrears), not mentioning making dialogues via a dialogue system. The dialogue system may be confronted with failures in recognition, or the client refuses to make a dialogue with the machine and directly hangs up the phone, and as a result, some clients still need to be tracked or grasped in subsequent operations.
Many patents have proposed similar outbound systems, for example, the outbound system focusing on a method for making an outbound call to contact an inbound party, such as the technology provided in U.S. Pat. No. 7,230,927, entitled “Non-blocking expandable call center architecture”. In addition, the U.S. Pat. No. 7,215,744, entitled “Call processing system with call screening”, provides a method for screening a list of outbound calls.
In addition, the U.S. Pat. No. 6,574,599, entitled “Voice-recognition-based methods for establishing outbound communication through a unified messaging system including intelligent calendar interface”, provides a task assignment system, similar to Orion system of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The U.S. Pat. No. 6,885,734, entitled “System and method for the creation and automatic deployment of personalized, dynamic and interactive inbound and outbound voice services, with real-time interactive voice database query”, provides a method for replying a query of an inbound party by an outbound call.
In addition, the best time to call technology (briefly referred to as BTTC below) may be obtained with reference to, for example, the U.S. Pat. No. 5,742,674, entitled “Automatic call-back system and method using data indicating best time to call” or the U.S. Pat. No. 6,917,671, entitled “Network-based method for notification of the best time to call”. Among all the above conventional BTTC technologies, the requirement for making an outbound call is first recorded by a system, and then, during the cheapest time period, the system helps the outbound party to make a call and callback the outbound party to establish the communication. However, the system does not have the function of setting which time is suitable for making a call or which time is suitable for dialing a certain phone number to contact a certain client, according to the records of calls previously made and finished.